


wherever you will go

by jdphoenix



Series: like howling at the moon [2]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Werewolf, F/M, Grant Ward Isn't Hydra, Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-01
Updated: 2019-02-01
Packaged: 2019-10-20 15:38:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17625110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jdphoenix/pseuds/jdphoenix
Summary: Jemma is sent undercover to infiltrate a group therapy session for werewolf attack victims. How badly could it go?





	wherever you will go

**Author's Note:**

> As you can see this is part two of a series that starts with "love don't leave me alone." You can (re)read that if you wish, but most of the big events from there are explained here so this can stand alone.

Jemma spares a glance for the moon overhead as she crosses the near-empty parking lot. With the sun behind the hills and the warm dusk glow just barely clinging on, the moon’s face is washed out, its craters barely visible. This is the second night of the full moon cycle and, thanks to it, their team is down a member. Which isn’t to say Jemma _wouldn’t_ be out here now otherwise. She was the one who forgot the second, smaller bag of supplies she’d packed and even if Ward had been here to offer to go in her stead, it’s doubtful she would have let him; describing the bag to him along with where it _might_ have fallen would have taken just as long as going herself.

With Ward on her mind, it’s no wonder the simple trek out to the van sends a shiver up her spine. There’s a bit of undeveloped land edging the lot, giving the impression of a wilderness, and naturally May had to park next to it, in the dead space between two of the lot’s streetlamps. The darkness is like a physical thing, sweeping in to wrap Jemma up in its dangerous depths.

She shakes off the silly thoughts as she turns the key in the back door. Her shivers are just as likely the result of autumn beginning to creep in as they are silly fantasies about things going bump in the night. She’ll grab a coat while she’s out here and later, when they’re leaving this facility in the true dark of night, she’ll be better off than any of the others. If only _they’d_ offered to grab her bag for her, then they wouldn’t be so-

The daydream skitters to a halt. Jemma’s heart is pounding. There was a sound, something more than the creak of a van door in need of oiling.

Just to be sure it wasn’t that—oh, how she wishes it was only that—she swings the door gently back and forth. The creak sounds again and she’s almost convinced herself it was only that and her imagination working in tandem when, in the silence left when the door stands fully open, she hears what is unmistakably a whine.

Her mind flies to the image of an injured animal, something domesticated as it’s seeking help from a human and no doubt lost and frightened. She steps around the van to peer into the trees and brush, looking darker now than they were when she first left the building only a few minutes ago.

“It’s all right,” she says, hoping to coax the animal out. It must be hiding beneath the thick branches.

But no. The darkness blinding her vision _moves_ and she realizes that it is the animal. A shadow as big as a man, one great paw steps out onto the asphalt and Jemma knows immediately by the sight of it that this creature is a werewolf.

This is the moment when she should scream. May would emerge from the building in a heartbeat. She and Coulson would shoot it or scare it off at the least—wolves certainly don’t make a habit of coming so near to civilization if they can help it and there are those distant hills that would be much more fun to run through, she’s sure. Or, they don’t come near unless, like any other animal, they’re driven to by hunger.

All of this Jemma thinks in the split-second after the paw appears. She does not think to run but she must move to because she has a topsy-turvy memory of the lab building, all lit up with its warm exterior lights flying through her vision and then the cold of the asphalt on her smarting palms. And then a weight on her back, a wet panting in her ear. And then- and then-

She should have screamed.

 

 

 

“No,” Dr. Brandt says firmly. Her crisp, no-nonsense voice pulls Jemma back from the haze of memory. “Perhaps you _should_ have called for help, I won’t deny that, but that you didn’t does not make what happened to you your fault.”

Jemma breathes deep, focusing more on her surroundings—the sun-lit conference room ten floors above the ground and the circle of strangers’ faces surrounding her—than on the doctor’s words. This group therapy session was only recently advertised in the local papers. It’s not the sort of thing a SHIELD agent would typically attend, not when there’s an entire department of the agency dedicated to just this thing, but Jemma isn’t here as a SHIELD agent.

She’s here as Jenna Simpson, recent transplant to the city, looking for some support dealing with her werewolf-related traumas. Everyone else in this room is here for the same reason. Some were attacked themselves, some lost loved ones to the infection itself or to an attack. So far they all seem to be a very kind, welcoming bunch, which is why Jemma is so surprised by the tenor of the gasp coming from Marjie, seated just to her right.

“Is that-?” she asks, her voice shaking in unmasked terror.

Jemma follows the line of her gaze and realizes that, in her remembrances, she’s been fiddling with the collar of her shirt, twisting and pulling at it where it hides the scars covering her shoulder. After several minutes of worrying, not much is hidden any longer.

Jemma swiftly sets her blouse to rights, but the damage is done.

“You were bitten?” Brandt asks, her voice pitched to a carefully gentle tone.

“Yes,” Jemma says and leaves it at that. This group is very specifically for those who have been hurt by werewolves, either directly or indirectly. It is _not_ a group for those personally suffering from the infection. The scar itself is proof Jemma isn’t—one of few benefits to the infection is that the monthly transformation heals most bodily damage—so it isn’t fear of a wolf in their midst that has the room suddenly heavy with silence. Oh no, those averted faces and pitying looks surrounding Jemma now are because everyone in this room knows there’s only one way to prevent infection from taking hold: killing the wolf who bit you before your first full moon.

Brandt deftly pulls the session back into order, touching briefly on the difficult personal decisions everyone with any connection to lycanthropy must make before she turns to Heidi, a young woman whose fiance was killed by a werewolf and who is praised for this week taking the step of accepting a date.

Jemma uses the cover of Heidi’s story to bring her own thoughts back in line. She isn’t here for therapy—though she was assured using her own story would make her job here that much easier—she’s here to suss out the true nature of this group. Not that she suspects anyone here of having nefarious purposes for coming, it’s the facility itself that has drawn SHIELD’s attention.

It appears that every floor of this building is rented out by a different entity. This one by a well-meaning non-profit. The one above by a law office. The labs on the lower floors—where Ward is currently undercover—by a pharmaceutical company seeking to ease the strain of lycanthropy symptoms. But each individual or business or charity, once tracked through a series of shell corporations that made even Skye’s head spin to dig through them all, ultimately leads back to none other than Ian Quinn.

With that link, as well as a disturbing amount of focus on werewolves (even the restaurant on the ground floor has a moon motif), the team wasted no time formulating a plan to infiltrate the facility. Naturally Skye can’t be seen anywhere near the building, as Quinn’s met her personally. Coulson’s out as well thanks to his appearance on many of the security cameras at Quinn’s home in Malta. But while Ward was there with him and just as visible, his recent return to the specialist rotation while the team was stood down left him with an impressive beard. It earned him no small amount of ribbing from Skye as well as enough cover to justify sending him in as a drifter looking for the quick cash the lab is offering its werewolf test subjects. May is here as well, acting as a janitorial worker with access to nearly the entire building. And of course Jemma’s story gave her a path in.

“Jenna?”

Jemma starts, realizing that around her the meeting has broken up. Dr. Brandt is sitting in the folding chair beside her, having taken Marjie’s place.

“It’s okay,” she says, smiling. “I know it can be tough, remembering. But I was hoping we could talk a bit more, if you have time.”

“Um, sure,” Jemma says. She eyes the group over by the snack table. “I haven’t found a job yet so I’ve got plenty of time.” And allowing the others to go on ahead will mean less people to notice if she gets conveniently lost on the way to the bathroom and peeks into a lab.

“Feel free to refrain from answering, this is about what you’re comfortable with—the time to push yourself will come later—but I have to ask, since you obviously-” Usually steady, Brandt stumbles over her words, her eyes straying to Jemma’s shoulder. “Did you know your attacker?”

“No,” Jemma says. It isn’t quite a lie. William Lowry was exactly what Ward is pretending to be now: a drifter, homeless, no family or connections to speak of. But Jemma connected with him. For one brief moment outside a grocery story in town, barely thirty hours before he infected her, they met and spoke. She touched his hand.

She and Skye had bought him one of the store’s hot lunches as well as some random odds and ends—hand warmers for the cold snap coming on, an umbrella, a book of word searches—and packed it all in a bag along with the remaining change from their grocery run. Jemma gave it to him while Skye carried all five bags of the team’s food to the van by herself. (Strength training, she called it.) The simple act of kindness was, for Jemma, forgotten as quickly as it was done. But for Lowry, who had lost his last human connection more than a year prior and was facing yet another moonrise in a few short hours, it must have appeared as a lifeline. He spent the next day and a half—what amount of it he wasn’t running through the hills as a wolf—stalking Jemma. She’s wondered what he might have been thinking during those long hours. Did he always intend on turning her to ease his own loneliness? Or was it some impulse he didn’t understand the goal behind until the wolf was digging its teeth into her? Did he even fight the desire, struggle with the morality of what he was going to do to her and ultimately lose out to his own pain and suffering? There was no time to ask him any of those questions. There was barely time for anything save putting two bullets in him.

“No,” Jemma says again, wiping at her stinging eyes. “I didn’t know him at all.”

Brandt hums lowly. Whatever she’s thinking, she’s prevented from sharing it by the scrape of the empty chairs around them. The donuts and coffee crowd has mostly disappeared and the maintenance staff has swept in to set the room to rights before it’s next used. Jemma and Brandt quickly stand so they can do their jobs and it’s with some relief that Jemma spots May among the workers.

Not that she was worried about her, but it’s been nearly three hours since she last had contact with a member of the team. She’s wearing a comm, naturally, but Coulson assured her it would remain silent unless she needed to be warned of some danger or she contacted the team in need of help, the better to prevent a repeat of a certain unfortunate incident at the Hub.

“Excuse me,” Brandt says, looking suddenly in a hurry. “I wanted to catch Heidi before she left.”

“Of course,” Jemma says. She takes her time gathering a new coffee cup and even a pastry—the stress of undercover work has left her famished—before wandering to the elevators. Luck is with her, as Brandt and Heidi are still back in the room and everyone else has gone before she arrives. She clumsily presses the button for the ground floor with the knuckles of the hand wrapped around her cup, “accidentally” pressing the button next to it as well. When the doors open, she’ll be focused on her phone, not notice she’s on the wrong floor until she’s gotten herself lost and oh no, she’ll have to go wandering to find her way out and she just might see some of the research going on along the way.

There’s a voice in her head that sounds a great deal like Fitz, reminding her that this is exactly the sort of thing Coulson told her _not_ to do on this mission. She was to go to her meeting and leave, nothing more. But what if those so-called scientists downstairs do something to Ward while he’s here? She’ll be in a far better position to counteract it if she has some idea of what they’re aiming for and even Fitz can’t argue with that, can he?

So Jemma fumbles with her coffee and donut and extracts her phone, trying to appear engrossed in her text messages and counting down the seconds until the elevator stops. It does so sooner than she expects, but rather than the empty hall she’d hoped for, into which she could step without being noticed, there are four security personnel outside. Blast.

“Ma’am?” one of them asks. He’s holding open the door with an arm like an iron bar and, looking up at him, Jemma notes they’re on the third floor, not the second as she’d planned. “If you wouldn’t mind coming with us?”

“I- I was just going to my car,” she says, completely forgetting that Jenna Simpson took a bus here from her supposed flat.

“Now, please.”

They’ve been made. That’s the only explanation for this. Jemma’s never been seen on any mission directly involving Quinn, but she’s been in public countless times with other members of the team Quinn can easily identify. All it would take is one stray bit of security footage and Quinn could have his people on the lookout for her as well. Which he obviously has.

Seeing as Jemma has no hope of fighting her way past four armed security guards and, with the elevator prevented from leaving, her only way out is through the door, she opts to follow their instructions. They’re surprisingly gentle. One of them takes her food and phone, while another holds her by the elbow but quickly releases her when his longer stride causes her to stumble. Truthfully she thinks he’s somewhat embarrassed by the way she yelps; she certainly is. Three turns—two lefts and a right—later, Jemma stumbles again, this time because they come around the corner to see Dr. Brandt and Heidi loitering outside a doorway.

Brandt smiles at the guards. “Oh, good, you found her. Now we can get started.”

Any thought that Heidi might be in on whatever nefarious goings-on are happening here is erased by both her confused look and the guard who moves away from Jemma to shadow her. Jemma’s heart begins to pound, true fear gripping her for the first time. If Heidi is here, then this is likely about something that was said during the meeting. Meaning that the team _hasn’t_ been exposed. Meaning that no one will be coming to rescue her.

“Excuse me,” Jemma says, turning to the nearest guard. “I’m sorry, but I have to ask, have you had any manscaping done? Your eyebrows are just so symmetrical.”

The guard is embarrassed by the question and his compatriots are plainly gearing up to tease him, but Brandt recovers quickly and orders them through the door. Jemma’s focus is split between the observation room they enter and the frantic questions being thrown at her over the suddenly live comm. She can’t answer any of them without again drawing attention to herself but then she doesn’t need to. After only a few moments, Coulson is promising that she’ll be fine, they’re coming in after her.

Her relief is short-lived, as Brandt’s discussion with one of the scientists penetrates her thoughts.

“-was ignored completely and the other was _bitten_.”

The scientist eyes Jemma. “And she escaped the infection?”

Brandt’s eyes light up as she confirms the fact.

“What does that have to do with anything?” Heidi asks, her voice on the edge of hysterical. “Why are we here?”

“Just a few tests,” Brandt says brightly, for a moment the same kind-hearted therapist Jemma met upstairs. But that veneer is ruined completely when Jemma and Heidi are taken into the room which this one is observing. The steady stream of reassurances coming over the comm cuts out as soon as Jemma crosses the threshold, the connection going dead. The room is long, perhaps a hundred feet, with a bright red door that lifts vertically at the far end, and is open save for a wall that sits perpendicular to the window and separates this end of the room into two. The wall itself isn’t even ten feet long but on either side of it sits a chair, each bolted to the floor. Heidi and Jemma are forced into these and restrained by the guards while a nurse does a blood draw. Or Jemma assumes Heidi receives the same treatment, given the fight she’s putting up on the other side of the wall.

She yells and eventually is driven to outright screams until a sharp crack cuts her off. Her whimpering is muffled and, a moment later, a guard rounds the wall. He’s holding a strip of cloth in his hand and Jemma recognizes it as Heidi’s scarf, though it’s only half as long as it should be.

“That won’t be necessary,” Brandt says. She smiles down at Jemma. “This one’s not a screamer.”

Jemma shivers at the cold reminder of what she confessed to this woman so recently. She looks again to the red door, her mind spinning with possibilities, probable experiments that would require a woman who was bitten and a woman who was left to cower in terror while her fiance was eaten alive only a few feet away. But no. It’s the middle of the day and tonight’s moon is only barely gibbous.

“What do you want?” Jemma asks, hoping both for some useful intel to relate after this is all over and to draw things out so that May will have a hope of reaching her before the experiment begins.

“To prevent what happened to you ever happening to anyone else,” Brandt says. “But to do that, we have to understand _why_ it happened. To you. And to Heidi’s fiance. But for some reason not to Heidi herself.”

Jemma shakes her head. “There wasn’t any reason. Heidi was- was lucky.” She stumbles over the word, knowing there’s little to consider fortunate about what happened. Poor Heidi likely has days in which she wishes she’d died along with her fiance, much as Jemma often wishes she’d acted differently that fateful night.

“That’s the general belief, but we think there’s something that sets people like you and Heidi’s dear departed fiance apart, something that draws wolves to you. Luckily we have one here. Transformed and ready to hunt.”

 _Ward_. Jemma’s heart constricts—he must be so scared and confused, transforming in the middle of the day, and will he even be able to turn back? Have these madmen considered that?

On the other side of the barrier, having overheard everything, Heidi has started screaming again, but the sound is heavily muffled and quickly fades to sobbing. “You can’t do this,” Jemma says. “People will notice us missing.”

“Will they?” Brandt asks in her reasonable therapist voice. “You just moved to town, only a few weeks after escaping infection? No friends, no family nearby? Not even a job? What reason could you possibly have to move? Unless—oh, Jenna—are you running from the law?” The feigned shock has Jemma squirming in her seat. She’s not running. Her status as a SHIELD agent—and, no doubt, Coulson’s influence—guarded her from any legal ramifications stemming from Lowry’s murder. But there should have been. Jemma _should_ be scared and hiding, just the way Lowry did as a result of his condition. It would only be fair.

“If we’re right,” Brandt goes on, “the boys in morphology get a new test subject. And if we’re wrong Heidi’s date will simply assume he’s been stood up. She’s been on the edge for months, no one will be surprised that she dropped off the map.”

“You’re insane,” Jemma says.

Brandt offers no defense to that. She follows the last of the guards out and the door closes behind her with a click that is far too mundane for locking two women in to meet their deaths. Either the door at the far end of the room is too distant or too quiet to be heard, or Jemma’s heart is simply pounding too loud for her to hear anything over it. Her eyes are uninhibited though and she can easily see Ward, fully transformed—in the middle of the day, more than a week ahead of the full moon—sniffing at the space the door slowly exposes.

This isn’t a dark twilight on the edge of the wilderness. It’s a carefully controlled laboratory in which Jemma knows precisely what to expect. Aside from the wolf, the two circumstances couldn’t be more different. But she knows what she would have done differently now and, though it’s unlikely to help her—more likely to draw Ward’s attention to her, in fact—she sees no other option. Perhaps, if he’s focused on her, he’ll leave poor Heidi alone. So Jemma screams, as loud and as long as she can.

Ward stills, his eyes fixing on her and his ears turning in her direction. Then all at once he’s scrambling at the ground, clawing at the tile to get under the door faster. It takes mere seconds for him to get through and that’s when Jemma’s voice finally fails her. She never saw Lowry like this. He was a shadow in the dark and then a weight on her back and teeth in her skin. He was never a fully formed animal, so big it could take her head off with a swipe of one limb, bearing down on her at breakneck speed.

She braces herself, hoping to be knocked out by the impact so that at least there will be that mercy. If she isn’t, she’ll have to control herself. She won’t want Ward hearing about how she cried and screamed.

At the last second she closes her eyes, too fearful to watch her death come for her. She hears a crash and something she can only describe as a sudden and brief fall of rain hits her from behind, but doesn’t leave her wet at all. Something gusts past her, stirring her hair, and there’s a yelp of pain and a growl. _Two_ growls, fighting with each other for dominance.

Jemma opens her eyes and is stunned to see two wolves, fighting amid a mess of glass and blood on the once pristine tile floor. There are screams and yells from behind her. Someone is dying but it isn’t Jemma and it isn’t Heidi and the wolves-

The one that was coming at her is brown. She didn’t realize before, but pressed up against the inky black of the second wolf, it’s obvious. The black wolf is stronger. It’s evident in his larger limbs, his broader back, and, most of all, the snap of bone when he shakes the brown wolf in his jaws.

He drops the dead wolf to the ground and, heaving with audible breaths, turns. Heidi whimpers when those eyes pass over her, but it’s Jemma who they stop on. Ward—because it can only be Ward—steps heavily over the glass. It crunches beneath his paws and must be hurting him, but he keeps coming until he butts his head into her chest and nuzzles her neck and shoulder with the top of his head.

“I’m all right,” she says over his low growl. “I’m all right.” She just hopes she’ll be able to say the same for him.

 

 

 

 

“Aaaaaand- _bam!_ ” Skye has the footage from the “experiment” up on the lounge’s big screen TV. All twelve angles of it, showing Ward sailing through the air to catch the other werewolf before it could attack Jemma.

“So cool,” Skye pronounces, rewinding it for a fifth time.

“It was stupid,” Ward says. He’s on the couch, to which he has been _ordered_ by Coulson following his (completely natural and with no help from Jemma, in spite of the hours she spent working on a cure) transformation back into a man. Not allowed to stand except for bathroom breaks, was the exact order, along with a threat that if he abused that privilege, the breaks could and would be limited in number. “My wolf is an idiot. He rammed his way head-first through a pane of glass; people _die_ doing that. I could’ve been cut in half!”

“It was very heroic though,” Jemma says. She was satisfied with the first viewing—in point of fact, she didn’t _need_ the viewing, living it was enough—and opted to instead make Ward a hero sandwich in honor of his heroic deeds, no matter how unwise he claims they were.

“And this! This is my favorite part!” Skye says. She’s sitting on the edge of the coffee table, likely blocking most of Ward’s view, and motioning backwards like she’d hit him to gain his attention if he were near enough.

“When I killed an innocent werewolf?”

Ward’s wry question is mild enough, but when Jemma, startled, meets his eyes across the lounge, he looks away a little too quickly. She knows what he’s feeling. Worse, she knows he’s feeling it because of her.

If Skye notices the tension in the room, she ignores it. “Ew, no! This part.”

Sandwich finished, Jemma comes around the edge of the lounge to take a look, curious to discover what Skye could enjoy more than Ward’s “action hero wolf moves” as she dubbed them earlier. On the screen, Ward is leaning into Jemma. After a few moments, he starts examining her, sniffing her all over and licking at wrists and ankles she hadn’t realized had been injured in her efforts to get free.

“ _What_ is going on here?” May demands.

Jemma starts so badly she nearly drops the sandwich on the floor. Skye jumps to her feet and Ward follows suit, only to be cowed into laying back down by May’s angry stare. Jemma, sure she’s about to be distracted by some new disaster, deposits the plate well within his reach and grabs his blanket—a fuzzy yellow one Skye dug up from god only knows where—off the floor.

“You,” May says. But she’s not looking at Ward, she’s looking at Jemma. “ _Sit_.”

“But-”

“Now.”

Ward tugs at Jemma’s belt-loops, pulling her down so suddenly she’s practically sitting on top of him.

“You were _both_ experimented on and nearly killed today, you are _both_ on mandatory rest.”

“But-” Jemma tries again.

May ignores her. She snaps her fingers at Skye and points at the two of them, a clear order that Skye is to watch them to be sure they stay where they’re meant to.

Skye salutes. “Yes, ma’am.”

Jemma watches May go then turns to Ward. “But I’m fine.”

Ward just shakes his head and settles down, twisting onto his side to allow her more room. “No use fighting it. You can’t beat the Cavalry.”

“I heard that!” comes from the direction of the cockpit and Ward winces.

Figuring she’s got no choice in the matter—and, truthfully, more than a little touched by the concern—Jemma tries to move to an armchair, but Skye refuses to let her, leaving her trapped on the edge of a couch Ward is taking up most of. At least Skye turns on a real movie to keep them occupied. And there is the sandwich, big enough for two.

As, it turns out, is the couch because—and Jemma has no idea _how_ this happens but—she wakes up hours later, stretched out alongside Ward and wrapped up in his arms, that yellow blanket draped over the pair of them (no doubt that was Skye’s doing). Not wanting to wake him, she remains where she is, noting with some appreciation that he’s just as warm now as he was with all that fur.

 


End file.
